Lockheed Martin, which failed to adhere to the specified system of units in the thruster performance data they submitted. This error went unnoticed, and that caused the crash.

That's the one I was thinking of.

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And anyway, the whole nationalistic concept of "Germans did this!" and "Americans did this!"

Nationalism is not the true cause of war. Nationalism as it is used by the Nazis is not what it actually means. Nationalism is pride in one's culture and is actually a good thing. World War II was a result of a tyrannical regime that was not nationalist, but invented a new Aryan culture, forcibly removing the old one and installing a belief in the dominance of their state. This is also known as fascism.

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beyond the recognition of individuals

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And if you think that our system of units is the backbone of or a large part of our culture, then I would say that we then have no culture to speak of and would be losing nothing by getting rid of it. (Of course, I disagree with that entirely).

I do believe in recognition of individuals, but my point was the the preservation of our nation's identity and the example I provided was merely a concrete.

No I don't think the customary is the only thing that defines America. I could say other things like, "Let's get rid of football and rename soccer because other nations are like that. It makes sense doesn't it? I mean in soccer your foot touches the ball a lot, but in football you usually throw the ball and run around carrying it."

Really, there's not much time for television in other parts of the world either. That is part of our electronic culture.

Freedom in general can be considered a cultural thing, other countries like to call themselves democracies but some of us know better (We are a federal republic, not a democracy, which is what killed Rome. And China is a "people's republic", how's that for a legally defined name?).

Here's another one; imagine the Egyptians building the pyramids, but they wrote all over them in a language that wasn't their own. Not only would it be really stupid, it would be confusing and we may end up crediting another civilization with their creation. Or perhaps someone built the pyramids and the Egyptians carved into them and wrote all over them. Then we show up, start studying them, and believe the pyramids are Egypt's despite evidence of their age being older than Egypt itself.

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I was using the word "country" in its general use, synonymous with the general use of "nation", which is to refer to a sovereign state or in some cases non-sovereign but extremely autonomous entities. The United States of America is indeed a federation, as are numerous other countries. That does not grant you the power to refer to it by a totally different name and not be incorrect.

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The USA is a collection of states united in a federal system, and aside from that just being plainly obvious, it's something that everyone is taught in school! Everyone in this country should know that information!

Again, though, you call these United States a country. Country and nation in their general use are not correct. People have forgotten that each state in the Union is an independent country. Think of the State of Israel. People call it a state, but it is also a country. An actual federation, being a collection of states, is therefore a union of countries, not a country in itself. Find that in a school textbook!

Also, if we are a federation and we are American, then we are the American Federation. American being an adjective and federation being a specific noun, and therefore capitalized, which makes it okay to call us the American Federation.

What we are dealing with is a government run curriculum that doesn't want us to think this way.

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our mathematical language is base 10 mathematics

Units of measurement are part of a mathematical language, and all of our mathematics are not base 10. Time and degrees, measurements handed down from Shumerians, are base 10 * 6. Therefore a full turn is 360 and an hour is 60 min and 3600 sec, and a minute is 60 sec.

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That is a non sequitur. I think we SHOULD do that, but if we have a uniform system of units it does not necessarily follow that we would also need a uniform language. Look at the portion of the world using SI units (i.e. pretty much all of it). They have been using said units for years and still have an astounding diversity in language and culture, and what changes there have been to those things can be traced to causes unrelated to metrication.

The argument for uniform units is the same as the argument for a uniform language; everyone understands one another. I am calling it a slippery slope. Most of these governments forced the metric system on their people and many of them are beginning to advocate multiculturalism in their schools. Schools should not teach kids how to be Africans (unless they are in Africa of course, and I understand that there are many cultures in Africa). They should teach kids about their own nationality and, at the most, cover the rest of the world generally in a geography (Unless they're teaching them about a super-wealthy nation such as America, which would actually be useful when they get jobs requiring them to deal with American companies).

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Country is not synonymous with nation in the way you were using the terms there, so this whole quote is nonsensical. Putting that aside however, it still makes no sense because you seem to be saying that if someone disagrees with whether something is true then it becomes not true. This is patently false.

I was merely pointing out that in each of the three Antebellum nations, there were general differences regarding the definition of a country. The North considered these United States a whole, indivisible. The South considered them countries, voluntarily joined by a pact creating a uniform monetary system, organizing military protection, and reconciling borders. To them this pact, if broken by the other participants, could be left. The West (my nation, which is no longer "west")could've gone either way, and were farther removed from things and therefore less educated (which is what I blame for the "King Andrew" fiasco). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------ Now our forefathers seemed to think that state's were above the federation, and therefore countries. Look at the tenth amendment. Thomas Jefferson was an advocate of state sovereignty as were the Democrats that followed him to undo the damage the Federalists were doing by abolishing the Articles of Confederation, which when you look at our government today and the mess they can justify by a couple of stray sentences in the Constitution, the articles in their simplicity start to look pretty good. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------ Back to the issue of the government not wanting us to think in this way; we are run by the government that won the Civil War, which gets to run the school curriculum and therefore write history. School textbooks have told us it was all about slavery, a condition which southerners felt guilty of (they could not get rid of it right away because their economy was so dependent on it that the economy would crash and leave everyone, including the slaves, poor and living in the woods), but Lincoln himself admitted that he couldn't care less about slavery, that the war was about "preserving the Union," about making these United States into a country, one of uniform laws, where an imperial city miles away could rule on things they were entirely disconnected from, destroying entire lives. The evils people complain of about our government, both by Republicans and Democrats, were sanctioned upon the Northern Nation's victory in the Civil War, and many of them started with the Civil War.

People complain of having no choices when they vote, just idiot vs. idiot. That started with the Civil War. Prior to that, Democrats (although somewhat damaged by King Andrew)were Libertarians, and Republicans were everything people don't like either party for today.

The regulation of trade via tariffs, especially to the expense of some states over others, was sanctioned after the Civil War.

The idea that the Federal Government was supreme was not legally dominant until after the Civil War. Were the government before the Civil War to propose the FBI, there would be an outcry. For the Federal Government to be able to make any dumb law that, as per the constitution, they're not allowed to make and suddenly be able to enforce it, would've been considered an invasion. Imagine the UN banning firearms worldwide and creating an International Bureau of Investigation so their laws could trump American laws, and then attempting to march from one end of America to the other to weed out violations. As futile as such an endeavor would be, it would nonetheless be unacceptable. (The thing the UN and the American Federation have in common is that they can both be defunded by their members, one way or another.)

People complain of powerful corporations taking advantage of the so-called common man, if one could be said to exist. The Civil War sanctioned government practices that allowed for this behavior, special privileges for campaign funds. The big one was that the tariff money that the government was bringing in from goods the southerners bought overseas was going to pay industries in America, which made overpriced, flimsy imitations of British goods then, for the quality products that they did not create. Of course the government then gets to play the blame game and make barely intelligible laws in such a quantity that they only have to enforce them on corporations that don't play their game, making the only way to succeed, being bad.

The racism and bigotry (I like to separate these two because the former means seeing a difference between two races, and the latter which means hatred because of the former) that plagued our federation for so many years was sanctioned, indirectly, after the Civil War. I point to the "carpetbaggers," northerners who came to the south, carrying suitcases that looked like carpets. These were Republicans and their aim was to push northern style politics on the south. The Freedman's Bureaus then "taught the blacks about law," meaning they showed them how to vote, in multiple counties per person, for candidates whose names they could not read. They were herded like cattle that way, which is plenty more racist and even bigoted than bringing them to a civil nation (which they might've never seen at all) and giving them a house and food in exchange for labor. I understand that a few masters were abusive, but there's a thing called "Yellow Journalism," which means only the sensational sells, therefore you'd never hear about the non-abusive masters, and I don't believe an entire section of America, a people conceived in liberty and equity could possibly be rotten to the core, even if slavery is a contradiction to freedom and is rightfully abolished. The problem is that because so many slaves were dumped at once from their homes, more than half of the southern population was unable to take care of itself, and consequently (the ones that did not go home to receive a pay that went entirely to rent their old shack back) had to live off the government. Considering that, before the war ended, their were free, slave-owning blacks in the South along with the rest of this paragraph (which is regrettably long and therefore you may need to reread parts) the government caused subsequent racial tensions that entailed a hundred year long struggle for equality only to have many northern blacks stay in their own communities living off the government and telling their kids that some white man is putting him down.

Although this may all seem a little off-track, when you put it all together, you see the underlying issue. We fought an entire war, killing nearly and possibly more than 700,000 Americans over whether or not this American Federation was a country or not. In other words, someone wanted power and destroying the meaning of the word state (being a synonym of country) was a good way of doing it. (Note: 700,000 is the number of troops who died plus the civilians, mostly women and children, in the South who starved to death or were hit with stray bullets.)

Now imagine Nazi Germany won. We'd have a lot of things screwed up there too. What we are experiencing here is a collective subconscious denial that we are the bad guys, making it unacceptable to advocate anything our victims stood for: free enterprise, state sovereignty (being the issue of whether or not America is a country), and small government. But the contradiction is that in fiction we are subconsciously geared to find sympathy toward rebels. Think of Serenity, which nobody even realizes is pro-Confederate but has all the necessary undertones, and Star Wars, in which a Republican Government is turned into a tyrannical regime and we root on the Rebellion throughout Episodes IV-VI or even in the first three when Padme expresses sympathy toward the Confederacy of Independent Systems, which were baited by the tyrant himself. Why then can we find no sympathy toward the Confederacy? Because we killed them and have a hard time dealing with it.

You may say this is quite a trip for a simple disagreement over whether or not America is a country (but hopefully now you see what a mess this misconception has created, or is a product of, or a mix of the two), but I had to draw my conclusions from somewhere and hopefully, if we can straighten out the damage done to our language, we can move on to healing a wounds in our nations that still feed the federation to this day.

"If you arrive at a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong." - Ayn Rand "It may be that our purpose on Earth is not to find God, but to create him." - Arthur C. Clarke

Nationalism is not the true cause of war. Nationalism as it is used by the Nazis is not what it actually means.

I wasn't referring to the Nazis at all. Most wars are enabled by nationalistic thought.

Quote (Enki)

People have forgotten that each state in the Union is an independent country.

If you really believe this then I don't think it's possible for us to continue this conversation.

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Think of the State of Israel. People call it a state, but it is also a country. An actual federation, being a collection of states, is therefore a union of countries, not a country in itself. Find that in a school textbook!

I am now quite sure that you don't know what any of these words means. If we can't agree to use the actual definitions of these terms then we have no basis for further conversation.

That's unavoidable for politicians. To choose a job in which you intend to make your country a better place for which you'll only receive abuse no matter what you do, you need to be extremely stupid. The smarter people stay away (and should be happy that imbeciles exist to do the job, although in a mediocre manner). But in this case this might backfire and Palin needs to be directed to a position with no real power, where she can believe she's doing an important job yet can't do any harm. Couldn't she become the leader of some important sounding committee producing reports that nobody reads?